… If Manchin acted and voted like a garden-variety Democratic senator, Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) could enact much of Biden’s agenda. But Manchin won’t permit that — and the reason turns on home-state politics. Unlike almost all other Senate Democrats, he’s trying to outrun a decades-long realignment in […] Read more »
How Should We Judge the Harris Vice Presidency?
More than 200 years after its creation, the vice presidency remains the least defined, and outright oddest, major political office in the United States. With almost no formal powers but the critical responsibility of needing to be prepared to assume the leadership of the nation at any moment, vice presidents […] Read more »
McLaughlin Poll: Biden Slipping, Trump Remains Strong – 80 Percent GOP Primary Vote Support
The voter optimism of the past few months has stalled in the new national poll of 1,000 likely voters that we posted this week and may once again be headed in the wrong direction. Over the past few months, more and more voters thought that the US was headed in […] Read more »
Biden approval above water but gets thumbs down on immigration, China, Russia
President Biden’s approval ratings remain healthy five months into his presidency. But on some important issues, including immigration and relations with China and Russia, the latest Fox News poll indicates that the president’s approval rating is underwater with voters across the nation. CONTINUED Paul Steinhauser, Fox News Read more »
The Cruel Logic of the Republican Party, Before and After Trump
Donald Trump has claimed credit for any number of things he benefited from but did not create, and the Republican Party’s reigning ideology is one of them: a politics of cruelty and exclusion that strategically exploits vulnerable Americans by portraying them as an existential threat, against whom acts of barbarism […] Read more »
What today’s GOP demonstrates about the dangers of partisan conformity
Rep. Liz Cheney talks to reporters after House Republicans voted to remove her as conference chair on May 12, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Robert B. Talisse, Vanderbilt University Directly following the 2020 election, Republicans seemed to be through with Donald Trump. Party leaders stopped speaking to him […] Read more »